Hewlett-Packard Employee Review

I worked at Hewlett-Packard

Pros – Great pay, very flexible sick time, will provide training certifications
Not a bad place to work if you are in Sales or Finance
Good if you want to coast, and be complacent in your software development career

Cons – Worked on software application that is slow, painful to use, full of bugs, 10 years behind in technology. It's hard to grow your career and be valuable in your field when the product is that bad. Many "developers" also just use GUIs rather than coding, which is embarrassing and results in slow, crappy applications.

Management insists on using waterfall, very resistant to any kind of change.

Most of my team worked nights and weekends since some of the development work was outsourced and we would often have critical failures during the night that required constant support. Management did not want team to set aside time to fix the causes of these problems because of the volume of new development that needed to be done.

Due to the very public senior management issues, there are tons all-employee required meetings to discuss "strategy" that are a huge waste of everyone's time.

Software division only exists to support Sales. Sales employees are far more respected within the company than engineers. Really not the best place for software development.

Advice to Senior Management – HP is going to fail if they do not focus on the quality of their products and efficiency of the business